I had fun showing off my artisan multi-grain sourdough bread but it took three days of my visit to prepare and was gone in a few hours. Wanting mama and all to have the most nutritious bread I decided to try a more quick and dirty recipe.

I prepared a quart of my starter and then mixed it with about 6 cups of spelt flour, the recipe (from Nourishing Traditions) said to rise from 4 to 12 hours depending on the temperature. I let it go overnight, which was probably too long as it got a bit deflated. I didn’t have loaf pans, so they were kind of batard style loaves. The shap of the slice wasn’t ideal but the flavor was wonderful and went great with the raw cream cheese spread I made.

As soon as I got home I started on another batch. This time I started with spelt berries and ground the flour myself. It sounds like a job for a toiling little red hen, but it’s just an electric gadget and doesn’t take any effort, but yields the freshest flour you can get, ensuring no rancidity. Spelt is a nice grain for home grinding because its gluten level perform like an all-purpose flour, which is actually a mix of soft and hard wheat. So, unless you want to grind two different grains, spelt is a lot simpler.

In my first go at grain grinding I just followed the directions and ground the whole berries on the finest setting, which gave me two distinct layers of flour, a fibery hull and a fine powdering flour. I used it as it came for the bread, which turned out delicious and hearty. After some expert advice, on the next batch I first ground the berries on a coarse setting and then ran it through again on the smallest setting which gave me a much more even flour and more flour per cup of berries (which seems to be about 2.5 c. of flour to 1 c. berries, but it depends on your grind- I am still working out that ratio)

The recipe called for the dough to be soft and easy to work with. To knead Sally says to stretch and fold, a different kneading process that I usually use.

I have now made three batches of the bread and the best results actually came from making the dough in my Kitchen-Aid mixer with the dough hook. The pictures below are from the batch made by hand, and it turns out beautifully, but the mixer does allow a wetter dough since you dont have to add more flour to be able to handle it. This was my fist time making dough with a machine and it left me standing there watching it, sort of wondering what I should do while it worked. It was strange to not be able to feel the dough change. So, I am still a bit conflicted about the thing. I was also hesitant to do sourdoughs in metal, but apparently it makes no difference.

Cooked in a loaf pan, this bread makes a great homemade substitute for sliced sandwich bread. Not the handsomest, but probably the freshest, healthy bread you can get in your mouth.

                          

Humans’ inclination to displace life’s challenges off of the body and onto a tool has shaped us from the beginning- most especially when it came to the challenge of eating.

Primatologist Richard Wrangham explains that the transition to cooking our food fundamentally shaped our bodies into what we are working with today, e.g. smaller mouths, smaller guts, punier teeth than apes. We have come to rely heavily on food processing (cooking, fermentation etc) for digestion.

So for better or for worse the human form was shaped in large part by processing our food, making digestion easier and leaving extra energy for thousands of years of other inventions, which are continuing to shape us in ways we don’t yet know. Which brings us to…the appendix!

The irony of the appendix is that it turns out to be much more functional to us than we thought, but may well be on its way out after all.

Scientists are continuing to find evidence that reveals the appendix as a useful organ, and not, as Charles Darwin assumed, just a remnant from past preference of plants. Studies from the last few years has show the appendix to be an evolved organ that houses good bacteria waiting to repopulate the gut after the system is flushed due to the presence of harmful microbes.

This use has been hidden from us since increased use of sterilization, clean drinking water and non-threatening foodstuffs has meant that survival in an industrialized world may be possible without an appendix. In fact the presence of the appendix seems to do more harm than good in clean conditions as they are finding a relationship between the inflammation of the appendix, which leads to its removal, and the fact that it is under-used.

As explained by researcher William Parker, Ph.D. (more from him here)

“Several decades ago, scientists suggested that people in industrialized societies might have such a high rate of appendicitis because of the so-called “hygiene hypothesis,”…This hypothesis posits that people in “hygienic” societies have higher rates of allergy and perhaps autoimmune disease because they — and hence their immune systems — have not been as challenged during everyday life by the host of parasites or other disease-causing organisms commonly found in the environment. So when these immune systems are challenged, they can over-react….

This over-reactive immune system may lead to the inflammation associated with appendicitis and could lead to the obstruction of the intestines that causes acute appendicitis…Thus, our modern health care and sanitation practices may account not only for the lack of a need for an appendix in our society, but also for much of the problems caused by the appendix in our society.”

So, what should we do with our vermiform organ? Use it or lose it?  “The function of the appendix could be rendered obsolete by cultural changes…” says Parker. “[Such changes have] left our immune systems with too little work and too much time their hands – a recipe for trouble.”

Cooking our food fundamentally changed the human body, and increased sanitation of food and drink seems to be on the way to do the same. But to just accept the obsolescence of this functional organ as a part of our ongoing evolution seems flawed. We can’t guarantee current conditions (not to mention that most of the world doesn’t experience such conditions) and we still are just discovering the power of the microbes in our gut as fighters of all sorts of disease; it seems hasty to just discount the thing entirely, though we often do since the appendectomy is the most commonly performed emergency operation in the world.

So, we should put it to use right?  Parker  posits that we should start challenging our appendix and the immune system generally with the tasks they are supposed to tackle. A completely great idea! However, I think he is looking to the problem for the solution…”If modern medicine could figure out a way to do that,” Parker says “we would see far fewer cases of allergies, autoimmune disease, and appendicitis.”

I think this dilemma provides a lovely analogy to the situation currently faced by the whole human body. We have these perfectly useful systems, well-adapted to deal with challenges of daily life for the last 499,950 years, give or take. Modern society has taken it upon itself to relieve us of these challenges, only to find out that they are entirely necessary!

In the case of the gut, we might try trusting our microbes to deal with the challenges they are capable of facing. Instead, we should rely on modern medicine to bottle up and feed us those very challenges it helped us/told us to avoid?

I say, start with what we have and use it as its meant to be used. Drink raw milk, dig in the dirt, eat fermented food, even get sick! Resist the obsolescence of the human body and challenge it to its fullest extent.

In that spirit, after the challenge of a long trek on foot (and embarking on the challenge of marriage) and a long break from the blog, I look forward to recounting the adventures and the lessons, along with continued thoughts from home kitchen. No longer the itinerant one below (for now anyway).

                          

There are a lot of discussions about this out there about this.

Apparently when Alice Waters said to skim off scum she also meant mold? I think being specific about something so out of the ordinary in cooking would have been helpful.

The germaphobe in me said to throw away the batch. Such a waste. Apparently it’s just like cheese and the rest was fine.  I really should have used the weight to keep the cabbage “anaerobic” under to brine to prevent this, but it is totally normal. A little research really goes a long way. I will try this again soon and not be so quick to give up.

                          

My first check up on my jar of not so briny cabbage (prepared using the Farmer John’s recipe) found a sweet and salty sort of dry mixture that tasted nice, but clearly wasn’t fermenting.

Since it seemed like it needed a boost to really get going, I decided to go more with the Alice Waters’ version and add some “brine” and cover it with a towel.

So I let it go like this for a few more days. Well…get ready scientists out there, we have some exciting results ahead…

MOLD!

Alice instructed to “remove any scum that may appear on the surface of the brine” and then taste. Well…I can’t imagine that this is what she meant, so I’m just letting this one go. This is terribly sad. I don’t know if this happened because it wasn’t sealed or because I omitted the part (still using the influence of the Farmer John version) with the weight on the cabbage keeping it below the brine.

We’re really disappointed, but hope to repeat the process being a little more careful. If anyone has any specifics tips, or have used either recipes referenced, pleased feel free to share your thoughts.

                          

Sauerkraut:

Two of my favorite cookbooks, the Art of Simple Food (Waters) and Farmer John’s Cookbook; The Real dirt on Vegetables, have recipes for homemade sauerkraut, and both tout the health and taste benefits of fermenting cabbage and other vegetables.

(note: both books are excellent resources for a variety of veggie-specific recipes. Very helpful with things that are in season with which you are not so familiar and ways to branch out in techniques, like braising, gratins, unexpected baked-good ingredients etc…I personally really appreciate this format)

The process for fermentation was a little different in each book. I leaned more towards the Farmer John method as it was framed as very traditional and involved pounding, which sounded fun. Waters’ process was simple enough, more about “working the cabbage with your fingers” than pounding and then adding extra “brine” if the working with the fingers didn’t produce enough liquid.

Well, Farmer John didn’t say anything about the amount of liquid, just to pound until you got some. Waters says to add a salt water mixture if there isn’t enough brine to cover the cabbage and even to make sure the cabbage stays submerged by weighting it down with something (a rock or whatever).

So, in the spirit of experimenting. I decided to go only by Farmer John and just see what happened. I started with less cabbage than called for, but sort of thoughtlessly added about as much salt and caraway seeds. So we’ll see. I’ll check on it in a few days and report with the taste. After this batch is eaten or composted, depending on the result I will try Water’s version.

Cabbage cut fine
and fermented in a brine
Made of its own juice, with salt.

(So it seems a little dry, but since the recipe doesn’t specify I am trying it out without my own changes- I will check back in)

Wait! There is more cabbage ahead!

Braised Savoy Cabbage:

From The Art of Simple Food this cabbage dish is sort of perfect; savory, crunch,and open to variations- my favorite. I decided to go with one of her listed variations that browns wedges of cabbage in olive oil. Then add garlic, a bay leave, thyme, salt and pepper. Having just picked up some beautiful fennel at the market yesterday I wanted to try out using the stalks/leaves- so I chopped up one stalk and threw that in too.

Immediately the kitchen filled with an earthy sweet fragrance- I was sort of taken aback actually by how delicious it smelled so quickly. Some glugs of wine go in and it cooks for a little while. Then stock is added (or water, but I prefer stock, and at 4 bucks a box it’s cheaper to just boil a whole chicken).

The cabbage needs another 15 minutes to get tender. In the meantime I pan fried two chicken sausages. I can’t pan fry without ending up throwing in a de-glazing liquid of some kind (usually white wine) and finishing whatever was frying with a quick pan sauce. All sorts of brown bits stuck from the sausage. Waters suggests putting some red wine vinegar over the cabbage when done. Instead I put the vinegar into the sausage pan (after the sausages were done and on their plates. Scraping up the good stuff and hearing that perfect hissing sizzling of the pan sauce, I poured it all over the dished out cabbage. Boy, it really turned out well. The whole process was maybe a half hour.

My fiance had the wherewithal to put some mustard on the table and that was it. Some leftover bread with a little butter served well to soak up the remaining liquid on the plate- too good to let it go to waste.

Indicative of how fast this was to prepare, there are no pictures of the process…and I could barely take a photo fast enough to catch the final product before devoured.